The fundamental leftist and anti-American claim about our ongoing conflict with political Islam is this: whatever has happened or does happen, it’s our fault. We provoked them into it by being dirty Yankee imperialists and by unkindly refusing to allow them to destroy Israel. But two things make crystal clear that this is not so:
1. The political arm of Islam has been waging terroristic holy war on the rest of the world for centuries.
2. It has waged this war against civilizations that have nothing to do with the West, let alone America.
This is why the case of Moslem aggression against India proves so much. Let’s look at the historical record.
India prior to the Moslem invasions was one of the world’s great civilizations. Tenth century Hindustan matched its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them.) Medieval India, before the Moslem invasion, was a richly imaginative culture, one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. And these were indigenous achievements and not, as in the case of many of the more celebrated high-points of Moslem culture, relics of pre-Moslem civilizations that Moslems had overrun.
